12102019 - 1934       

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       Why does this site exist? Each post on the front page of this website will seek to answer a question. The aim of this post is to answer the question, why does this site exist? 

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       This site exists to chart my journey as I develop the crafts of art, living outdoors and creating a website. I greatly enjoy spending time in remote places and creating art. I like to travel to waterfalls, mountains and rainforests. I like to explore these places and create graphic representations of the features I find the most interesting. Sometimes I do this with a camera, sometimes with oil pastels. I also create art to describe my inner world and to develop my understanding of religious and mythological symbolism.

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       Spending time outdoors is one of my favourite things to do. It's great to be at the top of a mountain, or trekking through a wild rainforest, but there is a lot of planning, preparation and skill that goes into being able to do this. To undertake such an endeavour one must be able to provide oneself with all of the resources to eat, drink, sleep and move through the terrain for days at a time, without experiencing loss of physiological functioning and while maintaining some degree of comfort. In other words, one must be self sufficient. This can be a difficult undertaking, but it need not be. I aim to share the skills necessary to achieve this with you.

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       Earlier this year - around Easter - I was hiking up a mountain and thinking about a book I'm writing and where to take it, in terms of artistic direction. A friend of mine had read part of my book and suggested to me that I take more care to describe the place/s in which the events of my book take place. Fearing success for my book and a potential influx of people to the places I describe in my book, I had decided not to describe them very well. But my friend had a good point in that a visual guide of the place/s I traveled through would be useful for the reader to imagine the narrative of the story taking place. How could I resolve this conundrum? That was one of the things I had decided to do on the hike and so, the mountain told me to draw oil pastels. It showed me the first one I was to do, which is called Serpentus Prime (insert hyperlink). I have done a few more oil pastels since then and I quite enjoy it. One of the things I would like to do with this site is share the oil pastels I do with humanity at large, to develop some sort of learning resource to help other people do stuff like that and to one day maybe sell some oil pastels.

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       While traversing that same slope I came up with the idea of punctuating the book with landscape pictures. Especially shots of the massive trees that live in the rainforest and the summits of the mountains that emerge from their canopies. Since then I've been taking hundreds of photos. I'm now at the point where I have decided to buy a decent camera so I can produce images that do justice to the amazing scenes that I lay eyes upon with increasingly regularity. Part of this website will be devoted to charting my journey as I learn to take and edit the best possible photos.

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       Another facet that will be developed is the seam of website development. All the stuff I have spoken about so far is to be displayed on a website. I would like this website to attract visitors who are willing and able to learn and share. This will entail the development of a set of skills that are very different to those required to produce art or live outdoors, but which are nevertheless very necessary in the modern world. Part of this journey will be developing my skill as a writer - after all I don't want to bore you. And I would like to find a way to make money out of this website so it can support a lifestyle spent mostly in the wilderness.

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       So that explains why the website, but what about the name? Why did I call this website Islands in the Sky? Well, it goes back to the photo at the top of this page. Which is a photo of an island in the sky. I came up with the name when I first climbed this mountain. I was sitting at the top of the Western slope and looking across to another summit. There was a strong breeze blowing from the East which blew a moisture laden airmass that turned to cloud as it cascaded into the landlocked valley on the leeward side, where I sat with my camera. When I took that shot the intervening valley was full of cloud and it seemed that I was sitting in the midst of an archipelago of Islands in the Sky, on a Sea of Clouds.

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       The scene before me was beautiful beyond describing, this beauty was the product of two confluent forces; the landscape I was in and my physiology in the moment. Being as I was at the top of a very tall mountain my eyes beheld a scene not beheld by many other eyes. The trees, shrubs and vines in a rainforest bear every shade of green, yellow and blue you can imagine, and then some. The sun shining and the shadows intermingling give rise to innumerable hues and shades of the same. The distance between the island you find yourself upon and the next varies the palette further, with subtle variations for every direction of the compass. The clouds moving above this poplar panoply reveal to the artists eye every variation of white and grey imaginable. Balance is provided at the beginning and end of the day with the orange, red and violet of Helios' gold oroborous traversing each end of Nyx' purest black, perforated only by Luna and the Milky Way who share with us silver and indigo.

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       As humans we are one of a few creatures whose experience of reality is constructed around our sense of vision. Most creatures experience the world through some sensory apparatus for detecting the presence of various chemical substances in whatever medium they happen to be suspended in. We are unique in that we build our reality in accordance with the photons we are able to perceive. The novelty of the unique array of photons I was able to perceive gazing across the valley was accentuated by the serotonin and endorphins flowing through my circulatory system after having walked to the top of this mighty ripple on our mother Gaia's beautiful form. 

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       In other words, I had been walking all day, I was a bit dehydrated, I was hungry, I was isolated in a remote place, I was a bit nervous and I was feeling that feel that people call 'runners high,' so the ordinarily beautiful view was simply celestial. I sat there on top of that mountain watching the clouds zooming back and forth so that the intervening terrain was alternately revealed and obscured. And when it was obscured it seemed that the mountain I was sitting on was an island rising from a sea of clouds. All of the mountains I could see to the North, the East and the West looked like islands too. For some reason islands are an enduring symbol in the collective unconscious of salvation and isolation. I wanted to use my book as way to describe the therapeutic effect that comes from time in nature and in that moment the mountains spoke to me and they called themselves Islands in the Sky.

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